This large volume of over 600 pages was for many years the standard reference work, in the English-speaking world at least, on the city of Rome, its hills, its streets, its walls and monuments.

Since 1929, research has progressed immensely, hundreds of scholars having opened new excavations in Rome, or analyzed old ones, as well as inscriptions, coins and literary evidence. For scholarly purposes the work is therefore dated; and superseded, to some extent by
A New Topographical Dictionary of Ancient Rome by L. Richardson, jr, published in 1992, and unquestionably by E. M. Steinby's Lexicon Topographicum Urbis Romae, 5 vols. (1993‑ ); as well as by the results of recent and current archaeology, among which in particular the major excavations of Trajan's Forum and the surrounding area.

But in view of the paucity of solid material (and the relatively large amount of nonsense) on the Web, caviling with Platner & Ashby is just that: the work remains extremely useful; and since the Topographical Dictionary is now in the public domain, and the others are not, I'm therefore putting the entire work online — almost done.

I've tried to link the references to Latin texts or other sites on the Web, as appropriate; and have sometimes illustrated the text with my own photographs. In the best medieval manner, I occasionally comment the text in a footnote, or when I manage to express myself succinctly, as Javascript annotations that you can read by placing your cursor over the
ºlittle bullets of various colors, or sometimes over the images.

The full text is already online, mind you,
at the University of Chicago Library:a yet as grateful as we should be for it, that Web edition has one major flaw. It is not searchable text, but rather a series of scanned images, page by page. That, and the opportunity to link to the work's sources or other material, is why I felt it useful to put the work online myself: the LacusCurtius pages of Platner are fully searchable.

For citation purposes, the pagination of the original is indicated in the sourcecode as local links.

I've also taken the opportunity to fold into the body of the text any addenda and corrigenda from pp601 ff. They are indicated in slightly different type.

My own photographs, and technically my notes, are not in the public domain, of course. If you have copyright questions,
just ask.

Articles transcribed on my site (major articles are in boldface):

My transcription of the dictionary is nearing completion; soon you will be able to browse all of it letter by letter. For now, just the letters not greyed out:

Note:

a
In January 2001, the Perseus Project also put the entire work online
here
as a searchable text, thus beating me to it by more than a decade, although I started first! This can only be to everyone's benefit of course, since their approach and mine differ — especially our linking schemes — and since servers, theirs or mine, do go down from time to time: another useful bookmark then. (I do like to think though that my version is better proofread, especially the Greek.)

Images with borders lead to more information.
The thicker the border, the more information.
(Details here.)

The Dictionary's table of bibliographical abbreviations is
here;
it includes links to those complete works that are online.